Recalling a World in Flames

Published: June 5, 1994

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"The next day, Ken flew the very same mission to the very same target." he said. "It's just that he never came back." Mr. Murphy said he has asked himself the same question for 50 years: "Why him and not me?"

"I remember him every day in my prayers," he said. "and that won't change after Monday."

<Lasting Wounds, Physical and Mental

For many veterans in New Jersey, the commemoration brings back similar memories of courage and self sacrifice, of anxiety over wounds both mental and physical that have yet to heal. Particularly among former prisoners of war.

For Joseph P. O'Donnell, 70 of Robbinsville, news of the D-Day invasion caught up to him while he was "a guest of the Third Reich," at Stalag Luft IV, a prison camp in Pomerania, now part of Poland, near the Baltic Sea.

Shot down on May 10, 1944, on his 13th mission, Mr. O'Donnell, a ball turret gunner on a B-17 named Patches by its pilot, was in a camp that held 10,000 Allied enlisted men, mostly fliers in four compounds. He recalled that in June a rumor passed through the camp "like a wave of jubilation."

"We were friendly with some of the guards, and there was this one fellow, Pop Gingrich, we used to call him because he was an old man of 35, and he confirmed that the Allies had made a landing, that the invasion was on," Mr. O'Donnell said. He said that his captors from that point on became dispirited, "that they knew it was for them the beginning of the end."

"For us, it was the light at the end of the tunnel, and freedom was down the path that led to our camp," he said. Such relief, however, was still a tortuous journey away. In a bitter winter with Soviet troops closing on the region, the camp was ordered evacuated on Feb. 6, 1945, and its inmates were forced to march west.

"We were told to get our belongings together and that we were going on a three-day march," Mr. O'Donnell said. "Well, three days turned into 86, and we covered 600 miles, sleeping in any barn the Germans could commandeer or in open fields. It snowed most of the time, there was never enough food, the temperature got down to 15 degrees below zero, our clothing was inadequate and we suffered from frostbite and dysentery."

The march came to be known buy its survivors as "the shoe leather express." Liberation came on May 2, 1945, at the hands of advancing British troops. After a brief hospitalization, many P.O.W.'s including Mr. O'Donnell, were repatriated but failed to report injuries incurred during their incarceration, since that would have required an extended hospital stay.

"Hey, I just spent 11 months in a camp," he said. "I just wanted to go home and see my family. Four weeks in the hospital to get checked out was four weeks too long."

Like many former P.O.W.'s now in their 70's, Mr. O'Donnell developed physical problems linked to exposure and malnutrition suffered during the war. Because of a lack of official paperwork, it took nearly a decade for him to qualify for a 100 percent Veterans Administration disability payment. Loss of All Teeth

"I lost all my teeth and developed peripheral neuropathy, a disorder of the nerve endings, because of the poor diet," he said. "I still can't hear out of one ear where a German sergeant cracked me across the head with his LUger when I didn't give him the answers he wanted during an interrogation shortly after I was captured."

Mr. O'Donnel said that tomorrow he would recall those comrades on the forced march, particularly William G. Mays from Tennessee, the top turret genner on his crew.

"During our march, I nrealy died," Mr. O'Donnell said. "It was a bitter cold April day and I'd gotten the flue. Between that and the dysentery. I sat down by the side of the road, put my head between my legs an didn't move. I just didn't care any more."

Mr. Mays came upon him, "PIcked me up, put his arm around my shoulder and down the road aways found me some coffee and food," Mr. O'Donnell said. "We decided there and then that we'd get through this together."

"It's not so much that I gave up," Mr. O'Donnell said. "It's just that I gave in." Plagued by Stress, Awake and Asleep

Vincent Fugarazzo, 72, of Nutley, another survivor of the "shoe leather express," knows his comrades' pain. In the years since the war, post-traumatic stress has plagued his dreams and waking moments, he said, and like many former P.O.W.'s, only in recent years has he been able to come to grips with his experiences.

"Since the war, I've had great difficulty relating to people, and it's been a strain on my family," said Mr. Fugarazzo, a retired communications specialist. "Sometimes, I feel that the only people who really understand what I went through, what I hold in my heart, are other P.O.W.'s."

On D-Day, as a 19-year-old radio operator aboard a B-17 named Shack Rat, Mr. Fugarazzo saw a glimpse of the vast invasion armada through a break in the clouds on the way to bomb an enemy airfield in France.

"I remember thinking, 'Boy, those poor guys are sure in for it, and here I am safe as can be in an airplane,"' he said. After being shot down on July 29, 1944, and severely injuring his back while parachuting, he said, he was ill prepared for the three-month forced march. 'Never Enough Food'